Last year, a top California lawmaker downplayed expectations for an important state housing bill, calling it a “gentle” remedy to the state’s crushing shortage.
One year later, with new housing legislation on the verge of becoming law in Sacramento, the same lawmaker isn’t tiptoeing around. Toni Atkins, the California Senate’s leader and top Democrat, called a deal to advance two bills “a monumental legislative agreement, and one of the most significant efforts to streamline and amplify housing production in decades.”
Assuming the twin bills pass a final hurdle and win Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature next week, they could unlock 1 million new housing units statewide. They both give fast-track permission to build housing on unused commercial land such as strip malls.
How the two new bills affect San Francisco remains to be seen. The Planning Department is reviewing recent amendments, chief of staff Dan Sider told The Frisc, “and like other significant pieces of state land use law, how they interact with our local controls is extraordinarily nuanced.”
Planning staffers are working on a report to brief the Planning Commission on one of the bills, Sider said.
Mayor London Breed’s administration has been trying for months to pass a much narrower housing bill, once known as Cars to Casas, which would allow fast-track development on auto-related sites such as parking lots and gas stations. It’s been stalled in a Board of Supervisors committee because the committee members are demanding that projects greenlighted by the bill should have higher minimums of affordable units.
The new state bills would overlap, leaving the choice of which policy to use in the developer’s hands.
They had been held up by warring views of labor standards that should be required of developers in exchange for the right to build housing more easily and quickly. The Senate’s bill has the backing of the powerful state Building and Construction Trades Council of California — known as the Trades — while the Assembly’s bill counts on support from affordable housing developers and the state’s Conference of Carpenters.
Following weeks of tense negotiations between the two unions, the labor groups failed to hammer out a compromise. So instead of choosing sides, top legislators like Atkins simply gave their seal of approval to both bills, which give developers two choices if they want to build housing where strip malls once were: Comply with stricter affordability standards or stricter labor standards.
Or, to echo an Old El Paso taco commercial, ¿Por qué no los dos?
“What I think the package represents is leadership from both sides, the Assembly and the Senate, saying ‘Both these bills are critical. We’re going to get both these bills off our floor. And we’re going to move this to the governor’s desk,’ ” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, the East Bay Democrat who authored the Assembly bill.
What the bills do
Both bills make it easier to build housing in now-empty stores, potentially leading to more than 1 million housing units across the state.
Wicks’ AB 2011 more narrowly targets infill building along heavily transited commercial corridors. Under her proposal, a developer would get to build housing “by right” — which means skipping lengthy and costly local review processes, including the much-dreaded California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA — as long as they paid workers union-level wages and offered health care benefits, among other requirements.
SB 6, by Sen. Anna Caballero, a Salinas Democrat, would knock down one key barrier to building housing in commercial sites — rezoning — but leave in place many other forums for local government input on housing projects. To take advantage of the rezoning benefit, developers must use a skilled and trained workforce, which effectively means a portion of the workforce must be union labor.
In a noteworthy concession from the trades, Caballero’s bill was amended Thursday to say that if developers don’t get at least two bids on a project, they can move forward with it anyway — as long as they pay union-level wages. “This is a huge victory for residential construction workers across the state, whether they be … part of a union or not,” said Erin Lehane, legislative director for the trades.
‘We’re going to see pretty quickly how the different models work.’
— Erin Lehane, legislative director for the Building and Construction Trades Council
Asked whether the trades would continue to oppose AB 2011, as they had previously stated, Lehane said: “Now we’re putting all of our effort into supporting SB 6.”
Besides labor standards, the main difference between the two bills is affordability. Under Wicks’ bill, at least 15 percent of housing units in a building built by right would need to be deed-restricted affordable — either for purchase or rental — to low-income households.
Alternatively, 8 percent of units would need to be affordable to very low-income households, and 5 percent would be affordable to extremely low-income households. Under a third option, 100 percent of units would be affordable.
Caballero’s bill cut down its original 15 percent affordability requirement to 0 — and was renamed the Middle-Class Housing Act to reflect that. Still, Caballero added that local governments can impose affordability requirements if they want. All San Francisco housing legislation must pass through the supervisors’ Land Use and Transportation Committee, which means a local version of the bill will likely add affordability requirements.
No meeting of the minds
“Every single interest group has a different interest and bills get hacked to death sometimes in the Legislature by 1,000 cuts,” Caballero said. “The affordable housing advocates want real high affordability. Developers don’t want real high affordability because then it becomes cost-prohibitive. The unions want good labor standards. … In the end, we decided to do two bills that do two different things that will create an opportunity for everybody to get something that they like.”
Lawmakers originally hoped this year’s negotiations might put an end to the years-long debate over labor standards that has killed multiple housing bills in previous years. That didn’t happen.
“There wasn’t any real room in our bill for a meeting of the minds about whether our bill would include a standard that we thought was unreachable and functions as a barrier,” said Danny Curtin, director of the California Conference of Carpenters, which co-sponsored AB 2011.
Now, lawmakers want to leave it to the market to decide which labor standards are more feasible. The bills are expected to be voted on next week in their chambers, and return to the other house for a concurrence vote by Aug. 31. “We’re going to see pretty quickly how the different models work,” Lehane said.
The original version of this article was reported and written by Manuela Tobias and published by CalMatters.